Connecting Brands with Influencers in 3 clicks!
Built the company from 0 to 2,000+ customers and exited in a $13M acquisition
Overview
Role
Co-Founder. Led design, product, and strategy
Responsibility
Led design and product from pre-launch through scale
Timeline (7 years)
Apr 2017 - May 2024
About The Project
I built Node App, a self-serve influencer marketing platform that connects brands to influencers. The platform streamlines the entire influencer marketing workflow across campaign creation, influencer casting, management, and reporting.
I led design and product end-to-end from 0 to 1, then scaled it through acquisition. I designed the full web and mobile experience and managed the engineering team throughout.
Outcome
⭐️ Acquired by Canada's Largest Influencer and Modeling Agency ⭐️
Node App’s growth fueled major traction, press, and a $13M acquisition. Highlights below capture key milestones from the journey.
Business insider
$13M acquisition featured in Business Insider
Times Square
Node App featured at Nasdaq Times Square
First Press Coverage
Early traction covered by National Post
Context
In early 2023, our strategy changed from growth to retention, as we prepared for an acquisition.
With M&A conversations underway, we prioritized expansion by reducing churn and driving upsells in existing accounts. By analyzing support emails and usage data, we found a clear bottleneck: influencer collaboration was hard to manage end to end, and the content brands received was often inconsistent.
So we redesigned the influencer mobile app around expectation alignment. I led product design for the mobile workflows from brief to content delivery, clarifying requirements and handoffs so creators knew exactly what to deliver and brands got what they expected.
This case study focuses on the mobile app’s visual and interaction design.
Problem Framing
Content misalignment was one of the top drivers of brand churn.
Brands said influencers “didn’t follow the request”, but influencers almost always believed they were following the brief. That gap made it hard to tell whether the issue was execution or communication, so we went deeper into support tickets and real campaign briefs.
What we found was consistent: many briefs mixed requirements, examples, and preferences in a way that was easy to miss or interpret differently. Important details were buried, terms were ambiguous, and influencers had no clear way to confirm what “done right” meant.
That insight pushed us to redesign how brands communicate expectations, and then redesign the influencer mobile app to make those expectations easier to see.
Conceptualization
Exploration
As the lead product designer (and co-founder), I owned the end-to-end redesign of the influencer mobile experience, focusing on how a campaign brief is translated into clear, actionable expectations for influencers.
Design Approach:
- Translate brand-side campaign brief inputs into an influencer-centered brief experience
- Clarify campaign requirements so they’re scannable, unambiguous, and hard to miss
- Audit patterns for brief readability (hierarchy, sections, content blocks.)
- Iterate with fast feedback loops (internal reviews and engineer feasibility checks)
- Prototype motion to validate browsing and navigation before moving into high-fidelity
Conceptualization
Exploration focused on testing navigation patterns and component layouts that improved readability, reduced cognitive load, and translated brand inputs into clear influencer actions.
Final Designs
Overview
I redesigned the mobile campaign detail experience, starting from the brand-side inputs and turning them into a clear, scannable brief for influencers. The work focused on reducing ambiguity in requirements while preserving context across the campaign lifecycle. The designs shipped.
Compensation details were designed to be transparent and easy to inspect without disrupting task flow. Payment breakdowns remain accessible while keeping primary actions visible.
The inputs we collect from brands during campaign creation are mapped directly to influencer-facing components. This ensures requirements, constraints, and incentives are preserved.
Figma Hand-Off
I shared detailed Figma files with engineering covering component states, edge cases, and conditional behaviors. This included variations based on brand inputs and how downstream screens update in response to those changes.
Outcome
- Shipped the redesigned campaign detail experience.
- Net dollar retention stabilized, even though new-account churn did not materially change.
- Improved retention stability supported the business during acquisition diligence.
- Campaign claim rate increased from 75% to 85% within 2 weeks of launch.
- The company was ultimately acquired.
Learnings
1. Data Analysis as a Core UX Research Tool
- As we grew, I leaned heavily on data by analyzing spreadsheets, generating charts, and visualizing drop-off points. This helped me uncover patterns in user behavior and proactively design around them, making product decisions faster and grounded in evidence.
2. Designing for Business Impact
- I learned that usability alone isn’t enough. Effective design must align with business goals. Today, I intentionally design with distribution, monetization, and retention in mind, ensuring that UX choices support both user needs and company strategy.
3. Product Intuition Is Earned Through Iteration
- I’ve learned that product sense isn’t just instinct. It’s developed by shipping fast, tracking performance closely, and refining based on real usage. The more cycles I went through, the sharper my intuition became around what works, what doesn’t, and why.
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